Laying my burden down.

It's time to write about almost losing someone I love to suicide. My friend, nonjudgmental keeper of my secrets and familiar respite from the strangeness of life, gave up. A fistful of time has passed since it happened and my mind is calming.

When I was younger and much less happy or adjusted to living, I thought I was unique in my terror of life and resignation to my weaknesses but I was very wrong. There are so many sad people.

I am only in the first part of my years here and I've known a few people who have killed themselves. The silent suffering that begins someone's plans to end their own life scares me the most. Those who succeed leave everyone saying the same thing. "I had no idea." And a steady, manic stream of whys.

I've talked with some who earnestly attempted but did not succeed. There is no choice sometimes, it seems, and the willingness to stay alive for the sake of others drowns in their inability to do so any longer. It is nothing personal, assured, and yes, they will miss you if there is any consciousness after death.

Myself, I slowly began to realize that my life is a story. Life will take you to faraway places you never planned and it will end. Everything changes, constantly, and nothing will last forever. Some have the kind of ending that trickle on and on after they are done and some are cut off in the middle of a turning point suddenly. I think long life, if we can help it, may be the pursuit of that lasting story.

We shouldn't think of ourselves as the titles that other people give us. Mother, co-worker, sick, rich. Or the ways people tell us we are. Happy, creative, controlling, shy. Our stumbling words, the way we wipe our noses, our eyebrows when we're curious, these are what make us. We are characters and the only way to tell any of us apart is that true, good sense of self.

I do not like that people lose their way. They do not wish for anything more to happen. The life picked out for them is a bad fit. They are limited and can not grow. They seem to hide this abnormailty like it's catching so that no one can stop them when the end comes. We get to know each other, love each other or hate each other, and none of us are truly permanent.

In the end, you can take yourself away and give your life up to other people's varied interpretations or you can stay around and prove that you are who you are. Wonderfully flawed, good and terrible, and only you.